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College Basketball Recruiting

One of the greatest articles ever written, when Bill Simmons was tolerable.





Blazers going up in smoke
By Bill Simmons
Page 2 columnist

Editor's Note: This column appears in the Dec. 22 edition of ESPN The Magazine.





They're breaking up the Blazers.



I didn't see it coming. When the team announced player conduct codes, it was like Christina Aguilera promising to wear more clothes -- you never imagined it could happen. Over the past few years, these guys taught us the difference between DUI and DUII. They've been accused of sneaking pot through airports, spitting on air-charter employees and hitting nightclub patrons with pool cues. Portland had already drafted so many shady characters that it got confused last June and just went for an Outlaw. The Blazers once signed a guy who left Seattle because he didn't want to register as a sex offender in Washington. Even one of the players' wives was arrested for drunken driving ... twice.


Damon and Rasheed helped give new meaning to the words "Trail Blazers."
So when they promised to clean things up, I shrugged it off. And then they traded Bonzi Wells. Gave him away, even. Just this season alone, he was suspended for cursing at Mo Cheeks and fined for flipping off his own fans. He told reporters he didn't remember the flipping incident because, "I black out and have black flashes sometimes." Then he explained, "I'm not going to be 100% perfect. I told you I'm going to have a 10% lapse." You can't make this stuff up.


According to a local paper, at practice the day of the trade, Rasheed Wallace pulled Wells aside, said, "Watch this," then whipped a basketball 100 feet into teammate Ruben Boumtje Boumtje. As the guy writhed on the ground, Bonzi and Sheed "giggled like schoolchildren and ran away."



Wells was the perfect captain for this team, and now he's gone. Rasheed is next. Which means he'll be shattering the unofficial career technical record somewhere else. Without Sheed, who will the Blazers get to be photographed at charity events unhappily making cell phone calls? Or to say things like, "I don't [care] about no trade rumors. As long as somebody CTC at the end of the day, I'm with them. For all you that don't know what CTC means, that's Cut The Check ... so long as somebody CTC, it's gravy with me"?



Hey, Rasheed played with Rod Strickland, Shawn Kemp, the immortal Isaiah Rider ... this guy knows crazy. And he knows how to suck the life out of his home fans. Don't the Blazers know that when you stop CTCing for a guy like this, you become just another team? It's better to be infamous than irrelevant. Couldn't the Blazers swing the other way ... you know, keep Rasheed, trade for Ricky Davis and Ron Artest and ride the CTC train for the rest of the decade?



There's still hope. Right now, Portland's best player is Zach Randolph, the same guy who sucker-punched teammate and sex offender Ruben Patterson, breaking his eye socket and spurring Ruben to say, "I can't retaliate, because I'm on probation, so I would get in trouble." (This quote didn't make the Blazers media guide.) Earlier this month, Randolph graciously deflected the spotlight away from his other teammates by getting arrested for a DUIIWL-WIFDWL (you don't want to know). It was the fourth marijuana-related incident for the aptly named Blazers in 13 months, shattering the record set by Gabe Kaplan's team in Fast Break. As Damon Stoudamire explained, "It's laughable, but it's not funny." He should know -- he was involved in two of those incidents.



So maybe this isn't over. Remember the "Scarface" scene when Tony starts screaming about being the bad guy, then yells at everyone in the restaurant, "You need people like me!" That's the Blazers. There's always been something reassuring about flipping them on and waiting for Rasheed to self-destruct. Or anticipating their spot coming up in the draft, confident that they'll take the best head case available. Or noticing SportsCenter in a bar, seeing a picture of a Blazer on the screen, not being able to hear the sound, and thinking, "I wonder what he did." Every league needs a team so crazy that their local paper runs a police-style blotter with every indiscretion.



Now, if Randolph and Stoudamire somehow fall in line, it will be the end of an era. So instead of dreaming about their reality TV show -- which would have been the best show of all time -- we'll have to wait for the E! True Hollywood Story. It's true. The Portland Trail Blazers are cleaning up their act. Sigh.
 
Simmons has always been an amazing writer. He invented his own style of sports journalism. The issue is he's always been a hot take artist, and lately that's all he does. I feel like the "make everything about Boston" shtick has tripled in frequency too.
 
rome8180 said:
To be fair, RJ and Cam were both hitting threes. The rare times that happened, no one was beating us. Virginia was another instance of that.
Click to expand...
The Kentucky game was also peak "Holy shit, Jack White unlocks the death lineup for this team!" and oddly without a lot of threes or blocks. He had 9 points, 11 boards, 3 assists, 2 steals, and just outplayed Kentucky's frontline.
 
childress22 said:
rome8180 said:
To be fair, RJ and Cam were both hitting threes. The rare times that happened, no one was beating us. Virginia was another instance of that.
Click to expand...
The Kentucky game was also peak "Holy shit, Jack White unlocks the death lineup for this team!" and oddly without a lot of threes or blocks. He had 9 points, 11 boards, 3 assists, 2 steals, and just outplayed Kentucky's frontline.
Click to expand...
He was so good until the Syracuse game. Fucking wild what happened to him.
 
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